Scowl: “This feels awfully vulnerable, but it’s a vulnerability that I’m ready to embrace”

After a busy first half of the year that saw them touring, touring and touring some more, Scowl have just dropped their first new music since last year's Psychic Dance Routine EP, the alt.rock-y Special.

The new track, with its spooky, Blair Witch Project-ish video, is also the California hardcore quintet's first outing with new label Dead Oceans, home to Phoebe Bridgers, Slowdive and Mitski.

Singer Kat Moss tells Kerrang! all this is the start of the band's next era. Speaking from home where she's enjoying a rare period of lengthy downtime before the new phase picks up properly, she takes us inside the song, the lyrics, the video, and how funny she finds her band's new "arena rock" banger…

Tell us about Special…
“It was the first song that I felt belonged in the next step of Scowl, when it came to lyrics, and the music just had a different feel. Of course, it's still Scowl and it's still very us, but I feel like this is us on steroids. We've cut away a lot of the fat in some regards, and really refined what emotions and what the feeling is that we want to convey. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here, but I feel like this is the most confident I've ever sounded, vocally, on a recording, and I'm very excited about that. So the song, on the structural, musical side, and the relationship that we all have with it, it’s cliché, but it is special. It's nice. It’s a new era.”

Where do the lyrics fit in with this new phase?
“When I was writing those lyrics, I was saying something that I didn't realise I felt yet, or couldn't fully conceptualise how I felt. It’s honest to the point where it almost feels childlike. It really is this moment of kicking and screaming with myself and fighting all the forces that may be – whether it's myself, or the world around me, or the people around me. You know, man vs. man, man vs. self, man vs. nature kind of vibes, all mashed into one, pointing the gun everywhere.

“How I visualise it is: I'm not trying to be this thing, but I do want it, but I don't, and it's this consistent power struggle with myself over this feeling of… not uniqueness, but rather thinking in a way that isn't the same as some of the people around me. I don't know if you've ever had that moment where you're like, ‘I just wish I could snap my fingers and my life would be normal,’ you know? That was where I was writing from quite a bit.

“I don't want to be different just to stay alive. Like, because there is kind of this feeling, I think, when you grow up feeling outcasted, that you almost cling to the way that you feel different, as a means to stay alive. It becomes comforting to eventually rely on the thing that you hated about yourself, and in a way that kind of eats itself alive. It really is that feeling of loving yourself, but then regression and loving yourself is very real. I don't think a lot of people talk about that, and how it's hard to love yourself when you see so many different angles of yourself constantly – whether it's through social media or pictures. Everybody has a different perspective and a different lens on the way they view the world and the way they view the people around them. So it's also about struggling with being perceived by a large volume of people, and feeling like I don't have control over that. Fine, fuck it. I'll burn it all down. I hope that makes sense!

“I personally feel really confident about the lyrics. Even though they're very simple, they're straight to the point. I'm telling the story of exactly how I feel. In that sense, it feels awfully vulnerable, but it's a sort of vulnerability that I'm really ready to embrace.”

It feels a bit different, there’s a big ’90s alt.rock vibe going on. Was that intentional?
“A little. Mostly we go, ‘Let's just write a song. Let's put a chorus together. Let's come up with a bridge.’ That’s how this was – nothing out of the ordinary, and there wasn't really any preconceived ideas yet, because usually my vocals come last. This is me being a little bit of a stubborn fucker, but I don't really like sharing my vocal ideas too much with the band until we get to recording, because we're all very indecisive, and we'll pick apart everything. Their opinion matters, but I don't open the floodgates until it's very realised.

“I was really liking how driving the music was, and how there’s that alt.rock vibe. It’s very radio rock, right? But that wasn't the intention, necessarily. It just felt good. It was kind of this unknown phenomena that happens when we write music. It's not like we're going into it like, ‘Okay, we want it like this.’ Whenever we’ve wanted it to sound a certain way, it never fucking does.

“The only preconceived notion I had about this song, writing-wise and vocals-wise, was that I wanted to sing as much as I can on it, and where I scream, I wanted it to feel emotional. I wanted to convey a sense of desperation, a sense of disconnect and desperate frustration. I wanted that moment to kind of have a sense of building tension.

“But yeah, there’s a whole ‘big rock’ side. I keep laughing at that, because it sounds like arena rock, but that wasn't what we went in to do. It's just a happy accident. I think that's a really good thing to have happened for us: to come out with something that feels like it could smash in a large room. That’s a dream come true.”

Do you think part of that’s come subconsciously from playing bigger places, and realising what bits of the set work really well on those stages?
“Absolutely. Playing bigger venues, you start to conceptualise, subconsciously, ‘How could I write a song that I could imagine a million faces singing back to me?’ I think that was the subconscious intention with writing a call-and-response chorus. My hope is that I don't have to sing that response, because it's just gonna be sung back at me.”

Where did the idea for the spooky, autumnal video come from?
“I wanted something that feels like a campy horror vide that me and my friends would have made in high school. We wanted to play with horror vibes because we're all fans of horror movies. We had to make it creepy. We love fake blood, we love getting really nasty. I also like to try my acting chops a little bit. But then with that, we wanted it to be funny. We’ve always persisted at some little bit of comedy intertwined with everything we do. We just can't take ourselves too serious.”

How was it, filming in the woods?
“It was awesome. We were in dusty, dirty California, and when you're out all day, the dust sticks to your body. And we were in so much poison oak. It was crazy. I'm really shocked that nobody from the set got any rashes at all. It was a long day, and it was pretty hot in the beginning, but it cooled down. We were also surrounded by so many critters! We were in this dry creek, and by the time the sun went down these very large spiders came out. They were the size of my palm, just hanging in the trees at night watching frogs. I loved them so much!”

This is your first music out on Dead Ocean. You’ve just signed to them, which means you’re mates with Phoebe Bridgers now, right?
“I wish! She's so cool. I love her music. I had the pleasure of seeing her perform with boygenius at Coachella two years ago, and totally cried my eyes out. I would love to kick it with Phoebe. She's amazing. She's so talented.

“It’s cool being on the new label. It's very exciting. I'm awfully giggly and giddy about it, but I'm also like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ It’s a platform I really adore. The cool thing about Scowl so far is that everybody we've worked with along the way has always been kind of my first choice. If I had a choice, I would say that [previous label] Flatspot was the dream label to get signed to as a hardcore band when we put out our first record. It was such a pleasure to stand on that roster. Being part of the Flatspot gang is the coolest thing ever. So now, stepping into the Dead Oceans realm, again, it’s that feeling of, ‘I'm a fan of everyone here already.’ I feel like I somehow broke some fandom fourth wall, and I get to be on the other side now!”

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• Drain: “It’s about a good group of friends saying, ‘We can do this shit. We can make something bigger!’”